"Toxic Masculinity" or Toxic Idealism?

How often does domestic violence take place because the perpetrator doesn’t know that it is wrong? Assuming that we are talking about violence inflicted upon the physically weaker individual, it is one of the most obvious of injustices. It is true that some highly regarded religious texts attempt to justify it in some cases, taking the same kind of reasoning which has been used to justify the corporal punishment of children - i.e. a theorised larger benefit for the individual through violence-induced self-discipline, so the possibility is there, especially in those cultures still dominated by such religious belief structures. But I think that it is safe to say that educational programs based around telling us that domestic violence is a bad thing will not have a major effect in minimising the problem as they are telling us what we already know.

As with any other form of destructive behaviour, domestic violence is counterproductive to the larger best interest of the perpetrator. Any relief from pent-up frustration experienced in the act of violence is liable to be offset by the longer-term disadvantages - feelings of guilt, possibility of punishment, progressive decline in benefits available from the victim through decrease in physical and emotional health. This may seem very cynical, but I present it this way for a reason. We have to understand that, even from the most clinical viewpoint, the abuser experiences a net loss. Once this is established the emphasis falls on the question of how the individual can gain the ability to behave differently - or, to look at it from a different perspective, what is driving the behaviour which is unhelpful both to themselves and to the victim.

Domestic violence may involve violence by men against women, men against men, women against men or women against women. There is also violence by adults against children, children against children and children against adults. But since a large slice of the problem is violence by men against women, this tends to be the main focus of educational programs aimed at addressing the problem.

One radical feminist approach which is gaining popularity describes aspects of archetypal masculinity as “toxic” and attempts to re-educated males out of them. I think this provides a good example of how an idealistic approach to a social problem can exacerbate rather than help it.

Before we take a look at the problems inherent in an idealistic approach to the problem, lets look at what we might achieve through a more pragmatic approach. 

Domestic violence is usually a form of expression for feelings of anger. So, given that anger is occurring, what can we do to channel it into something other than violence. As Bernard Lafayette said : “Violence is the language of the inarticulate.” Anything we can do to encourage people to give verbal expression to their feelings of anger is liable to reduce the incidence of violence. And this applies also to those who might end up on the receiving end of violence. A person who feels able to express their anger outwardly rather than adopt a submissive approach to life is less likely to end up being victimised by others. If walking away or seeking help are options they will be more likely to take them more quickly.

But where does the anger come from in the first place? Each of us has our character armour - our personality structure - the purpose of which is to protect us from threats internal and external. An internal threat might be feelings of worthlessness. We may have particular kinds of behaviour on which we pride ourselves because they carry the meaning for us that we are not worthless. Essentially the character armour is built from the conditions of our self-acceptance. If we use the example of an archetypal masculine persona, a young boy may have been taught that he’s not a real man if he cries. Thus not crying becomes a condition for his self-acceptance. All of us have some form of character armour. Playing on other’s pity by crying excessively and playing the victim, for instance, would just be another form of armour.

Insecurity in the armour can lead to outbursts of anger. When we don’t feel under threat, everything is peaceful, but when we feel our self-acceptance is under threat we will defend it aggressively by expressing angry feelings toward the source of the threat.

The more self-accepting we are, the less prone we are to anger or violence. Of course this doesn’t mean that people who don’t feel angry are necessarily self-accepting. The negative feelings can be directed inwardly rather than outwardly, thus many non-self-accepting people become depressed rather than angry.

Through cultivating unconditional self-acceptance we can increase the integrity and thus the health of our personality structure. If we have many conditions for our self-acceptance then we are like a hollow tree which many things can break. If we are self-sufficient in the maintenance of our self-acceptance then we are like a healthy tree which can resist or bend as required.

We achieve unconditional self-acceptance by learning to accept all of our thoughts and feelings. Let’s take a man who has been violent towards women. Telling him that his masculinity is “toxic” isn’t going to help him be more self-accepting. He feels angry. He wants to beat a woman. So this is the place for him to begin. He needs to accept that it is O.K. to feel angry and that is O.K. to want to beat a woman. He will feel these things whether he thinks they are O.K. or not, but recognising that the thoughts and the feelings do no harm in themselves and can be accepted in themselves will help to take the pressure off. The fact that he has, in the past, been violent, is an indication that his particular character structure and situation have resulted in a level of pressure pushing him towards violence which he was unable to resist. A demand - from the individual’s conscience or from others - that they be different from the way they are when they have no way of accommodating this demand can be a source of unbearable pressure. Drawing a distinction between the deed and the thoughts and feelings which lie behind the deed can be enough to free the individual from a good deal of this pressure. If they are made to feel that they are unacceptable for feeling like beating a woman then there is far less motive for resisting that urge. And if insecurities about self-worth are what lie at the heart of the character armour then we are hardly helping someone to free themselves of a destructive form of such armour by insisting that they are a bad person.

Copyright: alphaspirit / 123RF Stock Photo

Let’s look at a little myth or parable about the masculine and the feminine to see if we can put that aspect of the issue into some kind of historical context. The virtue of this format is that it allows for simplification.

A tribe live in the jungle. Both men and women spend time looking after the infants. Leopards from time to time eat one of the infants. The men make spears and head out into the jungle to kill the leopards and protect the women and children. (As child bearers the women are too valuable to be hunters.) Hunting requires the cultivation of competitive and aggressive abilities. The hunting culture comes to clash with the nurturing culture. The women tell the men not to be so macho when back amongst the tribe. Suppressing the voice of the nurturer within was a necessary part of becoming a successful hunter, so giving in to the critical voice of the nurturers would endanger the group, but resisting that critical voice means an increase in the behaviour which is being criticised. It is a negative feedback loop. This cultural divide between men and women determines the structure of our character armour with some of those made most insecure by the negative feedback loop feeling the need to exercise more and more control over society.

We can’t know if things actually happened like that, but I think that the pattern of criticism leading to an increase in the thing criticised is something we can see in society today. Constructive criticism is helpful to the secure individual, but if the negative behaviour arises from a state of insecurity then reestablishing a state of security is a prerequisite to being able to change for the better, and in this case criticism can be counterproductive.

While idealistic criticism leads to insecurity and retaliatory hostility, idealism itself is driven by insecurity. The more someone doubts their own worth the more addicted they may become to “proving” their worth by championing “the good”. If we have a lot of psychological room then we can think about all the shades of grey regarding any moral issue and we can recognise the underlying psychological issues which need to be addressed if we want an improvement in people’s behaviour. But if we are so insecure - so backed into a corner by our own dark side - that only a simplistic division between good and evil is possible and no strategy more complex than an insistence on the good can find a hold in our mind - then idealism is the result.

Which brings us back to the idea of trying to educate young men out of their “toxic masculinity”. This reminds me of the Chinese Cultural Revolution or the discipline and “consciousness raising” approach of religious cults. Education should be about giving people facts and tools, not trying to shape intentions and personalities. The shaping of intentions and personalities should be an autonomous process. We may be able to “educate” people to be submissive to our demands, but a society of such people is a dictatorship waiting to happen. If we want a truly healthy society it needs to be made up of individuals with the kind of integrity which can only grow naturally.

The concept of unconditional self-acceptance is very simple. At its heart is the idea that thoughts and feelings, in and of themselves, do no harm, but, no matter how apparently sick, may be steps on the way to a healthier mode of being. It isn’t an attempt to “educate” anyone out of anything as it is offered as a tool to be used only if the individual finds it useful.

Carl Jung said : "The healthy man does not torture others - generally it is the tortured who turn into torturers." If we apply this to those in our society who are given to violence, we are left with the question : “What is the nature of the violence which has been done to them?” Is it not possible to conceive that that violence is/was a lack of acceptance of some kind - a message conveyed by those around them (from parents to peers to religious teachers) that they were, in some essential way, unacceptable? Is it not the same kind of invisible violence that drives so many to suicide?

Of course here we find another negative feedback loop. The more violent acts a person commits the further recedes the possibility of the acceptance - both from themselves and others - they might require to lose the violent impulse.

It may be easy to lose hope for our society - torn as it is between those whose insecurity makes them cling to various forms of idealism and those who are driven to hostility by the wounds that that idealism’s lack of acceptance inflicts upon them (neither of those positions being mutually exclusive). But each of us who learns - through unconditional self-acceptance - to achieve reconciliation between the warring factions of our own psyche is an island of strength in a sea of weak and frightened individuals. The advantage lies with us.

Thoughts on Jeremy Griffith's "Freedom : The End of the Human Condition" - Part 4

Plato’s Cave Analogy

Griffth places a lot of emphasis on a passage in Plato’s famous dialogue The Republic where Socrates compares the human condition to life in a cave. Socrates says that what we take for the real world is not the real world. We are bound underground in a cave and what we take for reality is but the projection of shapes cast on the cave wall. There are fires behind us and objects are moved in front of the fires to produce the shadow images we believe to be reality. The role of the philosopher is to leave the cave and discover the truth in the form of the bright sunlight. He then goes back into the cave and tries to tell the rest of us about it. But, having known nothing but the cave existence, we will say that he is crazy and will resist being led out of the cave.

If Socrates had lived today he would have simply said that what we take to be reality is really just a movie. We are sitting in a dark movie theatre watching the flickering shadows on the screen and taking it for reality. No need for us to be bound. If the movie, to us, is reality, where else would we go?

The Matrix essentially turned Socrates’ cave analogy into a blockbuster science fiction movie.

But, if we are not in a Matrix, then what we experience with our five senses is real. There is ground underneath our feet. The sun we see in the sky is the real sun. So what was Socrate’s talking about?

He was talking about psychological realities. Or rather the psychological distortion of reality.

It is interesting that he used the concept of projecting, because it fits well with the concept of projection that we find in Jungian psychology - that what we see in the world around is a projection of aspects of our own psyche.

But perhaps filtering is a better term than projection. Projection suggests that we are seeing things which have no external reality at all. On the contrary, the content of what we see is, more often than not, something which really exists. What is illusory is the shape it takes for us, because our mind exaggerates those aspects which reinforce our armour and blocks out those aspects which might threaten it.

This is why, to see naked reality, we need be unconditionally self-accepting. Then we can acknowledge all aspects of the world around us without fearing that any of them will threaten our self-image.

It is true that if someone told us that we were blind to reality and cut off from life, we would probably say that they were insane. They would be accusing us of being insane, after all, and since they are one and we are many, it would be natural for us to assume that the problem lay with them.

And if we tried to forcefully break open someone’s character armour (how else to drag them from the cave into the sunlight?) they would, indeed, forcefully resist. The purpose of the armour is self-protection. If we feel safe we may take our armour off voluntarily, but any attempt at force will only increase our need for the protection with which we feel it provides us.

Don Quixote

Griffith finds great significance in the fact that Miguel de Cervantes’ novel Don Quixote was voted “The Greatest Book of All Time” by a group of acclaimed writers. He sees in the title character a depiction of the heroism of our species in the face of the human condition - feeble but undaunted in a serious of hopeless battles.

I haven’t read the novel, so I can’t speak about it in any detail, but note that it is a comic novel poking fun at the absurdity of an elderly man giving himself a glorious title, donning a suit of armour, riding a skinny old horse and battling windmills that he mistakes for giants. Is he not like us when our self-acceptance becomes eroded? We lack the healthy psychological underpinning (horse) for our endeavours. We try to compensate for our insecurities by giving ourselves egotistical airs (bogus nobility). We don our character armour. And we go into battle against a projection in the outside world of the denied aspect of our own psyche.

Adam Stork

Central to Griffith’s theory about the origin of the human condition is the story of Adam Stork.

He believes that we have a genetic orientation to unconditional selflessness. This came about through a positive feedback loop overriding the principle of the “selfish gene”. The food-rich environment of the Rift Valley in Africa enabled the nurturing period of our proto-human ancestors to lengthen. The mothers were nurturing their children for genetically “selfish” reasons - because those children would carry on their own genes. But the children didn’t know that. To them their mothers seemed to be acting selflessly, so they grew up believing that loving cooperation and selflessness were the meaning of existence. What was learned by the mind and practiced by the body over many generations came to be encoded in the genes as an instinct.

Unlike Griffith, I’m not a biologist. My understanding of genes and the manner in which instincts are encoded in them, and how instincts interact with the rest of the mind in its relationship with its environment, is negligible. So forgive me if I make some false assumptions in my attempt to make sense of this all.

How could we test Griffith’s hypothesis? I can understand how we could identify a gene for a particular disease by looking at the DNA of people who have that disease and at the DNA of a sample of people who don’t and looking for what the first group have in common that is absent in the other. But how would we find empirical evidence for a particular instinct which we are expecting to be universal to the human species?

Griffith feels that this genetic orientation, acquired through the nurturing process, is the source of our “moral conscience”. But doesn’t morality vary from culture to culture? And don’t different individuals feel guilty about different things?

Griffith narrows down the “morality” of this instinctive orientation to cooperation, love and selflessness. He sees these as the central ideals of the great philosophies and religions.

It is undeniable that most of the great things which humans have achieved have been achieved through our capacity to cooperate. Love is the very essence of the ability to cooperate freely, rather than in the spirit of subservience. And if we take “selflessness” to mean the willingness to sacrifice oneself, if necessary, for the interests of the group, then that also is something which contributes to the success of the whole.

What we have in these values is something analogous to the functioning of cells in the body. A cell cannot exist long on its own, or if it goes against the functioning of the system of which it is a part. So it is in its best interest to perform its function well. If we were, with a little poetic license, to attribute conscious motivation and human-like feelings to the cell, we could say that the pleasure principle motivates it. It feels good doing its job cooperatively, enjoying the fellowship and support of the other cells, and it is avoiding the discomfort which would come from ceasing to do so. Would such a cell sacrifice itself? Of course, if the whole required it, because what is the alternative? Without the whole, it would have no existence anyway.

So this makes sense as a function of healthy living systems. But does it, in humans, require the guidance of an instinct beyond the instinct to seek pleasure and avoid suffering? It feels good to be a part of a healthy system. For humans that state of healthy functioning could certainly have been disturbed by the arrival of idealism, driving a wedge as it did between men and women and their respective roles and preventing us from simply doing what came naturally, taking us from a natural society to an artificially repressive one.

But Griffith sees it the other way around - that the ideals came first in the form of an instinctive orientation to selflessness, and that that instinctive orientation was a dictatorial and unforgiving one.

He compares this instinct to the instinctive flight path of a bird, whom he names Adam Stork. Adam Stork has an instinctive flightpath encoded in his genes. He follows that migratory route every year. But one day he miraculously grows a fully-conscious mind. His mind starts contemplating possible courses of action. Will he fly off course to check out an interesting island? Will he go pig out on some apples he sees growing on a tree? When he tries any of these things, his instincts tell him to fly back on course. They criticise him. But he has a conscious mind now. He has to experiment in self-management in order to develop the powers that it brings with it that the blind instincts don’t have. So he does fly off course and begin experimenting, but the constant whining of his instincts make him angry (at the criticism), egocentric (embattled against the criticism) and alienated (blocked off from aspects of reality which might remind him of the critical instincts). But the more angry, egocentric and alienated he becomes the further his behaviour departs from the expectations of his instincts. It’s a negative feedback loop.

This story does have appeal. Most of us can relate to being punished for being naughty. And the conscience can certainly be a “Sharp accuser, but a helpless friend!” (Alexander Pope)

But is the genetic conscience theory the most accountable one?

A conscience which is a function of the ego and arises from the social phenomenon of idealism - a kind of conceptual virus which has removed us from our natural loving selves - could be just as harsh. And some  manifestations of conscience do not pull us in the direction of cooperation or love, but away from it. Take the conscience of the extreme ascetic. He feels he must whip himself to appease his conscience, but his self-flagellation serves no integrative purpose. His conscience propels him towards self-obsession not selflessness or cooperation with others. The form of idealism which tells him that bodily pleasure is sinful is the complete opposite of the cooperativeness and love we see among the bonobos which is accompanied by almost constant sharing of such pleasure through genital-genital rubbing.

In the Adam Stork story the instinct for loving behaviour is dictatorial in nature. It tells us we must do things its way, and it will brook no argument.

Love is not dictatorial. It is the opposite. It is grounded in acceptance. An instinct for love,  learned in the process of being nurtured, can’t be comparable to a bird’s flight path. There is only one way to go for the bird. Migrating is a linear process. But think of a mother caring lovingly for her child. She can only do this effectively by responding spontaneously to the child’s ever-changing behaviour. There is no fixed course. Love is not dictatorial, it is improvisational. The unconditionally loving mother will accept her child’s behaviour unless she believes it is counter-productive for him.

How can a product of this forgiving process be unforgiving?

Griffith feels that all we have lacked is an ability to explain ourselves, but you can’t explain anything to genes. I suppose he feels that that is not a problem because we just have to explain ourselves to ourselves, then we can silence the complaints of our genes by conforming to their dictates, reconciled to our fate by the knowledge of why we have to do so.

For me this is too much like slavery. I think that, if we cultivate unconditional self-acceptance and dethrone idealism and replace it with pragmatism, we will naturally unleash the capacity for love and cooperation which has, for so long, been buried within us. We will become members of a healthy loving society because it fills us with bliss to cast off our armour and truly be together, not because we have surrendered to some jackboot-wearing genes.

Read Part 5

Chimpanzees, Typewriters and the Inevitability of Paradise

We are an expression of an unpredictably creative deterministic system which some of us refer to as “the universe" and others refer to as “God".

A system has certain characteristics which are broadly predictable. It is for this reason that we are able to see laws behind natural phenomena and, to some extent, make accurate predictions based on those laws. But the direction of creation is towards greater levels of complexity. This takes place through a process known as “emergence" and this is not predictable the first time that it happens. Something truly new is coming into existence and yet it is still a product of the functioning of an inevitable system. There is no such thing as randomness or chance in a connected universe.

To get an idea of how higher levels of complexity can arise from simple deterministic principles it is worth looking at the example of fractals. These are patterns generated by simple mathematical formulae. When mapped out with computer graphics they reveal wildly complex patterns in which the overall shape is re-iterated on each level :

Like a circle in a spiral

Like a wheel within a wheel

Never ending or beginning

On an ever spinning reel

The Windmills of Your Mind (Michel Legrand, Alan Bergman, Marilyn Bergman).

The relationship between our sun and its planets is close enough to a steady state for us to make predictions about where another planet will be in relation to ours at any particular time, but it isn't really a steady state. Scientists tell us that every year the earth moves 15 centimetres farther from the sun. This isn't much, but it shows that the stability of the system is relative not absolute.

Systems theory reveals that the emergence of a new level of complexity occurs through the process of a system becoming destabilised. Systems seek order, and if one kind of order breaks down, then a more complex form of order has to come into existence. This is not an imposed order but an order which arises from the expression of natural laws on a higher level of organisation. Where we see disorder, as we do in our social system, it is because that system is in the transition phase – it is in the inevitable state of breakdown which leads to breakthrough – to emergence into the next level of orderly system.

Another way to think of the relationship between the predictable and unpredictable aspects of creation is to imagine a classroom where a bunch of children are engaged in a creative writing exercise. There are rules about how they can behave. They are not allowed to fly paper planes across the room. They are not allowed to get out of their chairs. They are not allowed to chew gum. So we can make some predictions about how behaviour in the classroom will look based on those rules. But we can't predict that Tommy will write a story about a dragon that likes to eat its own bogies after roasting them in its fire. This story is an instance of emergence. It is an inevitable product of the universal system but we don't have the brain capacity necessary to process all of the information which led to its expression. We can tell that it is an expression of the intersection of the historical dragon myth with the “eat your own bogies" meme popular with little boys, but we could not predict that Tommy would be the point in the system where this particular manifestation of this intersection should be expressed at this particular moment unless we had a complete dynamic map of the social system of which Tommy is a part. All we could do is to make a probabilistic prediction that between 5 and 10 school boys will write an essay about dragons eating their own bogies this year based on the number of school boys who have done so in each of the previous twenty years.

There is a tendency, where we can't understand something, to attribute it to an imaginary being. Primitive peoples who didn't know anything about the geological structure of the earth attributed volcanic eruptions to the anger of the volcano god. Today there are many scientists who carry on this trend by attributing anything they can't predict to a mythological entity called “randomness". Randomness is the concept that something can happen which is not an inevitable manifestation of the system within which it takes place.

Our central symbol for randomness is the throwing of a dice. And it is from the study of dice throwing which we developed the theory of probability. We can't predict what number is going to come up when we throw a dice, but we can predict the likelihood of the spread of numbers which will come up over a large enough sample. While we can't predict the outcome of a single dice throw, that doesn't mean it is not deterministic in its nature and thus theoretically predictable. How the dice lands depends on such factors as its mass, its shape, how hard and in which direction we throw it and the nature of the surface on which it falls. We don't have the ability to measure and assess all of this information with enough accuracy to predict how the dice will fall, but it is theoretically possible.

Evolution is often presented as the result of “random" mutations, rather than a deterministic interaction between members of species and their environment.

In physics, proponents of the theories of quantum mechanics claim that the behaviour of subatomic particles is evidence of randomness because it can't be predicted even though we can detect probable trends. Sounds a bit like our problem with dice. And this was Albert Einstein's attitude to quantum mechanics – “God doesn't play with dice." Einstein, like myself, did not believe in a personal God, but in the pantheistic conception of God as a way of referring to the integrated nature of the creative universal system.

The belief that we live in a probabilistic rather than deterministic universe has led to much absurdity, such as the idea that an infinite number of alternate universes exist parallel to each other and that anything which we can imagine must have happened in at least one of them. This denies the relationships between things. How could there be a universe in which there are people who breath water but in which there is no water? I can imagine that well enough to write down the concept, but it can't exist in reality because it wouldn't work. If we want to understand the universe in which we live we have to understand its connectedness and thus its inevitability. It's no good me asking myself : “What would it have been like if I'd been born in China?" because someone born in China could not be me. I could only have been born at the precise place and time at which I was born, because even the slightest variation, as chaos theory shows us, changes the whole system.

Another expression of the probabilistic world view is the idea that, if you could train an infinite number of chimpanzees to type and then waited an infinite amount of time, one of them would type the complete works of Shakespeare¹. This would not happen. It is a complete misunderstanding of how things come into existence. Shakespeare's plays were an expression of the system which could only occur at the position of the system known as “Shakespeare". No-one else could have written the plays and Shakespeare could not have written Finnegan's Wake or Twilight. They could only be written by James Joyce and Stephanie Meyer respectively. Each is an expression which requires the knowledge and influences unique to those individuals. Even assuming we could teach chimpanzees to type, they would not type keys probabilistically. An infinite number of chimpanzees might all just thump their fingers on the keyboard in a similar way, which would not produce the variety necessary to accidentally produce a novel or play. What would most likely happen is that they would quickly get bored and jam up the typewriter mechanism with their own faeces. The products of one level of complexity cannot be produced by an entity on a lower level of complexity. The same does not apply in reverse. Stephanie Meyer could quite easily jam up a typewriter with her own faeces should she so choose.

What about the concept of “free will"? If we are part of a deterministic system, then does this mean that free will is an illusion? Yes. But we can better understand this when we recognise that it is also an oxymoron. And to understand why we need to look at the nature of freedom.

The best analogy for deterministic freedom is that of a water molecule travelling down a river to the sea. The molecule moves freely. There are no impediments to block its path. But that path is determined by the movement of the other molecules around it in response to the environment of the riverbank which determines the course of the flow. It's behaviour is determined but not determined in the way that a wind-up robot's behaviour is determined by its mechanism.

We human's are capable of acts of will, but these acts are the product of cultural influences which come from outside ourselves. We can't be other than an expression of the system. So what do we mean by will? The will is the active aspect of the ego. The ego is our sense of our self as a discreet entity. It is constructed of our beliefs. When we act on the basis of our beliefs, that is will. But we do not chose our beliefs, they are a crystallisation of prevalent ideas which come together within us in the only way they could. When our beliefs change it is because we have come in contact with other ideas outside of ourselves which have overridden the preceding ones. Of course, in each individual case it is too complex a process to fully break down and analyse and it is always in flux.

At the heart of any act of will is a lack of acceptance of something. There is something with which we do not feel satisfied and so our will drives us to seek to change it. This might be something as simple as washing the dishes or as complex as seeking a cure for cancer. But it is only an act of will if there is resistance. If I want to wash the dishes, then doing so is an act of free expression. But if I'm feeling lazy I have to will myself to do them. And if we are trying to change something in our environment will will only be required if that something is resistant to change, which is more often the case if we are working against the grain so to speak.

The central characteristic of will is the experience of a relative loss of freedom. The thought behind an act of will is the thought that we have to do something - that we have no alternative. The mountaineer must climb the mountain. The boxer must fight the fight. By contrast the state of freedom is like being a guest at a party where we could kiss the hostess, stand on our head or piss in the punchbowl, among many other possibilities. Such behaviour is not goal-orientated in the way that an act of will is, but whatever we do will be an inevitable expression of the universal system in the place we inhabit. So if someone pisses in the punchbowl, blame the perversity of the universe.

We may think that will is necessary in order that anything get done. No good just sitting around accepting everything. But acceptance is the basis for love and love desires to help and to understand. Love can be the basis for discovery and problem solving. In science love would inspire us to find understanding and work with nature to solve our problems, whereas will inspires us to try to solve problems by changing nature without fully understanding it first. It is the wilful approach to science and technology which has led scientists to misinterpret data in order to support their prejudices and has encouraged our technological development to be at the expense of our ecological life-support systems. The alternative, accepting what is and responding to it in the way which comes naturally to us, will lead to better results.

One way to picture our situation is that we are all cast adrift upon a stormy sea, each in a fragile little boat. The boat is our ego and we need it because the sea is so stormy. Were the sea calm we would swim in it happily. The sea on which we are cast adrift is the schizophrenic mind of God. What emerged in the jump from the other primates to humans was mind as we conceive it. Chimpanzees have the ability to reason on a very basic level, but human intelligence is to chimpanzee intelligence as the fractal is to the mathematical formula which leads to it. A period of disorder accompanies emergence. In the case of human intelligence the root of the disorder was a split in perception which led to the concepts of Good and Evil. This acted like a virus splitting our perception of the world and ourselves in such a way that everything became divided into warring factions. But this was a problem which would begin slowly and then increase exponentially up until the present.

In the beginning we experienced ourselves as an expression of the natural system. This was true as a species (expressed in such myths as that of Adam and Eve) and in our individual lives (as an infant we have to learn the difference between “me" and “not me"). We lived in God. But the idea that it is meaningful to split the world into Good and Evil caused a disharmony which alienated us from this sense of connectedness. We were “cast out of the Garden of Eden". With the invention of language our mind became a collective mind in the sense that each of us is like a synapse and words and the concepts which are expressed through their varying combinations are the impulses travelling through those synapses. We have, as Carl Jung discovered, a collective unconscious. We soak up cultural material without even being aware of it and our subconscious associates this material in ways determined by the flow of different trends within the social system. Now, with television and the internet, the subconscious of each individual is more complex than it was in Jung's day, but the deepest trends are the most universal – the patterns which lie at the heart of the complexity – the formula that produced the fractal.

In science fiction we have the idea of alien species with a “hive mind". We have such a mind and always have had, but it is a schizophrenic hive mind, it is perpetually at war with itself. And this is why we need our lifeboats – our egos – to stay afloat in the maelstrom. I once thought that, even in a state of psychological freedom we would still need our ego in order to self-manage, but this isn't true. We don't need to experience ourselves as separate entities in order to do what we need to do. Our body is made up of separate cells each doing what is required for the maintenance of the whole. But this is only possible if our “hive mind" is not divided against itself and thus deranged. As long as that is the case we need our ego to keep afloat. Many of us have been thrown from our boats by the violence of the storms and come face to face with the reality of the divided mind of humanity in a way which caused us to be labelled “insane" by those still safely in their boats and many have been lost at sea, i.e. committed suicide.

The development of the ego is symbolised in the story of Noah and the ark. When it became clear that living on dry land (remaining psychologically connected to the living system) was becoming impossible due to our internally divided state, and that we would thus become separated from that state by the sea of our growing conceptual consciousness, we developed the individual ego. In Noah's Ark were stored all of the complimentary pairings into which our dualistic conciousness had split things – male and female of every animal. In time the complimentary pairings produced by the dualistic split in our consciousness would become warring factions in many instances.

This analogy also appears in the Leonard Cohen song Suzanne :

And Jesus was a sailor

When he walked upon the water

And he spent a long time watching

From his lonely wooden tower

And when he knew for certain

Only drowning men could see him

He said “All men will be sailors then

Until the sea shall free them"

So our egos have been necessary, but the downside is that they separate us from the ability to perceive unfiltered reality. The ego is a structure of distorted beliefs about reality. It is a form of alienation from reality. If we are going to stay in our boat we have to twist our perception of reality in such a way that it doesn't challenge those distorted beliefs. This is why physicists will look at the behaviour of subatomic particles and see something that “proves" the existence of randomness. Because to think down the honest pathway of the inevitable unfolding of all things is to follow a pathway of thought that leads inexorably to the dissolution of one's own ego. Everybody wants to go to heaven but nobody wants to die. And, yet, the death of the ego is the way to heaven once we have an understanding, as we now do, which can cure the virus of dualism, reconcile the warring factions and bring peace and sanity to our “hive mind" – the mind of God.

The dissolution of our egos into the mind of God is what was predicted by Jesus was “the Kingdom of Heaven" and “the coming of the Son of Man". The term “Son of Man" acknowledges that the next level of emergence is generated by the one which comes before. So unified humanity is the offspring of divided humanity.

Now before this would occur Jesus prophesied that the shit would really hit the fan. The key concept here is given in the passage which begins at Matthew 24:15 : “So when you see standing in the holy place 'the abomination that causes desolation' spoken of through the prophet Daniel – let the reader understand – then let those who are in Judea flee to the mountains... How dreadful it will be in those days for pregnant women and nursing mothers..."

What is “the abomination that causes desolation"? We can see that it is idealism. The original virus which contaminated humanity was the false perception that it is meaningful or beneficial to think of some things as Good and some things as Evil and to use our will to try to compel ourselves to pursue the former and avoid the latter. To be fully wedded to this false perception is to be an idealist.

So what is all this about “the abomination" being put “in the holy place"? Since we can see that an accurate understanding of reality is one which acknowledges the larger whole of which each person or thing is an expression we can see that how truthful something or someone is is dependant on how whole (i.e. undivided) they are and thus the degree to which they can acknowledge their connection to the whole. Our word for this is “holy". We have begun to acknowledge this idea in a non-mystical way with our concepts of “holistic medicine" and “the holistic paradigm for science".

In 1988, an Australian biologist by the name of Jeremy Griffith published a book called Free : The End of the Human Condition – The Biological Reason Why Humans Have Had to Be Individual, Competitive, Egocentric & Aggressive. He said that the book, which he spent 13 years writing, “grew out of my desperate need to reconcile my extreme idealism with reality". He presented it as an holistic understanding of the human condition. Central to his explanation is the concept that our conscience, that part of us which tells us what is good, is part of our genetic programming, and that our competitive, egocentric and aggressive behaviour has been an unavoidable rebellion against the oppressive criticism with which that programming responded to our experiments in the use of our newly found intelligence for self-management. He appears to believe that this “knowledge" will itself bring about a reconciliation of all of the conflicts in the world. The problem is that his “defence for humanity" is no defence because our conscience, for those of us who have one, is a part of our ego. In effect then Griffith's books are an unconscious attempt on his part to will his idealism onto the rest of us by presenting it as liberating holistic knowledge. And they are a brilliant attempt because they contain so many of the ideas which would be needed for a genuine liberating understanding but assembled the wrong way and presented with an emphasis on confronting us about our “non-ideal" behaviour. Of course the number of people who've read Griffith's books, or even heard of him, is limited, but all ideas, especially about really important topics, leak out into general awareness. Many in Australia who never read any of his books would have seen him on daytime television at one stage defending his idea that sex is “an attack on innocence". (from Free : “Men invented sex, as in 'fucking' or destroying, as distinct from the act of procreation. What was being 'fucked' or destroyed was women's innocence.")

Griffith gives his own interpretation of the prophesy in his 2003 book A Species in Denial : “...when Christ was unmasking the lie of pseudo-idealism he used the deadly accurate description offered by the Old Testament prophet Daniel, 'the abomination that causes desolation'." So what does he mean by “pseudo-idealism"? Later in the book he says : “One of the problems to be overcome in introducing these denial-free understandings is that there have been so many 'false prophets' promoting artificial, pseudo forms of ideality that the whole business of bringing ideality to the world has been extremely discredited. These false forms of ideality, such as the New Age Movement, Environmentalism, Feminism, the Politically Correct Deconstructionist Movement, The Peace Movement, are such superficially satisfying forms of idealism to live through that when the real ideality arrives, namely the reconciling understanding of the human condition, people actually prefer the non-confronting, false forms of ideality... These false or pseudo forms of ideality are extremely seductive because they give people relief from the horror of their corrupted state by allowing them to feel good about themselves without having to confront their corrupted state. In a world where people are rapidly becoming more corrupted and in need of relief from their condition, pseudo-idealism has become a plague. In fact it has gained such a foothold that it now threatens to control the world and lead it to a totally non-confronting, truthless state of oblivion. Pseudo-idealism is the 'Antichrist' because it is at base anti-truth, opposed to the truth which Christ so wholly represented." Here we have a classic example of paranoia, a false prophet with an oppressive dishonest dogma seeing those who pursue other approaches to addressing the problems of the world as the ones who are deluded and dangerous – that is, he sees in them a projection of the truth he can't face about himself. A Prophet in Denial would have been a more appropriate title for the book.

Glossy insert used to promote A Species in Denial in Australian newspapers

So idealism dressed up as holism is what Jesus and Daniel where on about when they talked about the “abomination that causes desolation" being “in the holy place". And this was the peak point of the danger and destruction which grew out of that original concept of Good and Evil. But this is how systems work. Everything is inevitable and everything is necessary. Only by having the key problem crystallised into its most potent form could it be studied and the real cure found. But it has been a harsh ride for us all. I included the passage about pregnant women and nursing mothers, because one of Griffith's key beliefs is that babies are born with a genetically coded expectation of finding an ideal world and the protection of their innocence depends on being sheltered from contact with the non-ideal nature of the world. This concept puts a lot of pressure on mothers, but it shouldn't, because it is bullshit. The only idealists in the world are neurotic adults. What children most need is for we adults to stop worrying so much. So this prevalent concept, of which Griffith's expression is simply the most extreme, is itself harmful to the welfare of children. It is the generator of a negative feedback loop which causes depression for both mothers and eventually, when they reach adolescence, their children.

Just as these toxic ideas about Good and Evil have sowed division and conflict, so a clear understanding which heals the split will spread out through the mind of God and our ego boats will inevitably dissolve and free us into the bliss of Heaven on Earth. There is nothing to do but do what comes naturally. Acts of will are no longer useful.

The rise of the “Kingdom of Heaven" is something which will happen both within us and around us as the divisions which have characterised our existence heal. When emergence takes place unexpected patterns are revealed. We wouldn't expect water vapour to form into beautiful snowflakes. In the same way we will witness seemingly miraculous coincidences, a phenomena which Jung labelled synchronicity and described as an “acausal connecting principle". Another example of an acausal connecting principle is gravity. “Ah," you may say, "but gravity causes apples to fall from trees." But it doesn't. Gravity doesn't cause anything to do anything, it only shapes the way in which it does it. The word “cause" is defined as : “A person or thing that gives rise to an action, phenomenon, or condition." Gravity doesn't “give rise" to the fall of the apple, whatever dis-attaches it from the tree does. So synchronicity is like gravity, it doesn't make anything happen and it is invisible, but we will be able to know it by the way that it shapes the healing of humanity.

1For the sake of simplicity I will assume that William Shakespeare actually wrote the plays attributed to him, something which is disputed by some.

Deciphering the Jesus Fairy Tale - Part 1

"Repent for the Kingdom of Heaven is near." Matthew 3:2, NIV (1984).

I don't believe in the supernatural. And yet, somehow, the words of Jesus, as recorded in the New Testament and the apocryphal gospels, have always been intensely meaningful to me. I've increasingly come to see what appear to be supernatural elements in the philosophy he expressed to be symbolic rather than literal – a description of perceivable rational aspects of reality in poetic terms.

There are a couple of possible explanations for this. We live in a universe in which patterns are repeated. This is why it is so easy to come up with metaphors, because aspects of our own experience often follow similar patterns to those of nature. We might say : "I was holding in my grief, but then the dam broke." The two phenomena are independent but the pattern is the same. So Jesus might have been a man who believed in the supernatural, and it might be a coincidence that the pattern of his supernatural belief system sometimes is in sync with my own rationalistic belief system.

On the other hand it is possible that Jesus didn't believe in the supernatural either but was using poetic language because it was the only kind of language he had available to him to communicate his ideas. When we say that someone is "wrestling with his demons" we know that we don't mean he is literally fighting with evil supernatural entities, but we often assume that those who lived in an era when science was only just beginning must have always been talking literally when they made references to supernatural beings. This may not always have been the case. Today we can talk about neurosis, psychosis, systems theory, evolution, etc., but in Jesus' day the scientific framework for such ways of talking about ourselves and the nature of the universe did not exist. Jesus seems to have acknowledged the limitations under which he was working. "Though I have been speaking figuratively, a time is coming when I will no longer use this kind of language but will tell you plainly about my Father." John 16:25, NIV, 1984. (In prophetic speech the individual is a mouthpiece for some form of deeper collective awareness, what Jung called the collective unconscious, and so we can't assume that Jesus thought he would be able to achieve this personally.)

It is also important to remember that the accounts of Jesus life which have been handed down to us were most likely recorded generations after the events occurred. To we neurotics the healthy individual is liable to appear magical. We have two options to explain the difference between us and them. We can think of ourselves as healthy individuals and them as superhuman, or we can acknowledge that the difference is due to our own state of sickness. The former assumption tends to be the more comfortable one. And when stories are handed down under these circumstances it is likely that the metaphorical will transmute into the literal. Lazarus may have said : "It was as if I were dead, but since I met Jesus, I am now alive." A hundred or more years later and the story becomes one of Jesus reanimating Lazarus' corpse.

So this series of articles will be an explanation of what Jesus' words mean to me. I'm no authority. I haven't done a lot of reading on the topic, even in the Bible. So this is a personal experiment the value of which depends, as with all my writing here, only on whether it strikes a chord with the reader. But I certainly would encourage anyone to do more reading and to take an interest in the interpretations others may put upon these words which have had such a profound impact on our culture and our history.

"Repent for the Kingdom of Heaven is near" is one of Jesus most famous statements. The traditional interpretation is that we should express shame for our sinful ways and put them behind us as a supernatural deity is going to assert control in some way and we will be sorry if we are not in line with the new order he will be establishing. Alternatively, I suppose, the Kingdom of Heaven could be interpreted as a place we go after we die and thus the admonition would be to repent before we die and have to face this supernatural deity in the after life.

Wikipedia gives this definition : "Repentance is the activity of reviewing one's actions and feeling contrition or regret for past wrongs." But it also says : In the New Testament the word translated as 'repentance' is the Greek word μετάνοια (metanoia), "after/behind one's mind", which is a compound word of the preposition 'meta' (after, with), and the verb 'noeo' (to perceive, to think, the result of perceiving or observing). In this compound word the preposition combines the two meanings of time and change, which may be denoted by 'after' and 'different'; so that the whole compound means: 'to think differently after'. Metanoia is therefore primarily an after-thought, different from the former thought; a change of mind accompanied by regret and change of conduct, "change of mind and heart", or, "change of consciousness".

What was Jesus really talking about when he referred to "the Kingdom of Heaven"? He referred to "Heaven" or "the Kingdom of Heaven" a lot. If we don't believe in the supernatural, and thus don't believe in a personal after-life, is this term meaningless?

Whatever Jesus meant by "the Kingdom of Heaven" was something he felt was "near". In this context the term is often interpreted as "about to occur". If this were the case then Jesus was wrong. Almost two thousand years later Christians are still waiting for such an event. So, while it might still occur, it was not imminent in Jesus' own time.

But the term "near" can also refer to something which is in close physical proximity to us. Something which already exists. In the apocryphal Gospel of Thomas it says : Jesus said, "If those who lead you say to you, 'See, the kingdom is in the sky,' then the birds of the sky will precede you. If they say to you, 'It is in the sea,' then the fish will precede you. Rather, the kingdom is inside of you, and it is outside of you. When you come to know yourselves, then you will become known, and you will realize that it is you who are the sons of the living father. But if you will not know yourselves, you dwell in poverty and it is you who are that poverty." Gospel of Thomas, Log 3. Here Jesus says that "the Kingdom" is inside of us and outside of us. It is not coming, it is already here. But it is close in proximity. Nothing can be closer to us than something which is within us.

To understand what might be meant by the term "Heaven" in a non-supernatural sense we need to consider the nature of joy or bliss as well as the nature of suffering. Symbolically, Heaven is a symbol for bliss and Hell is a symbol for suffering. The common denominator of all suffering is self-consciousness. When we feel physical or emotion pain our consciousness focusses naturally on our self. Anxiety, shame, embarrassment... All of these are emotional states which involve an intense awareness of our self. By contrast, joy, bliss or ecstasy are states in which we forget ourselves, in which our enjoyment of something is so great that we are lost in it. Our emotional experience is rich but it is unselfconscious.

"Outside the trap, right close by, is living Life, all around one, in everything the eye can see and the ear can hear and the nose can smell. To the victims within the trap it is eternal agony, a temptation as for Tantalus. You see it, you feel it, you smell it, you eternally long for it, yet you can never never get through the exit out of the trap. To get out of the trap simply has become an impossibility. It can only be had in dreams and in poems and in great music and paintings, but it is no longer in your motility. The keys to the exit are cemented into your own character armour and into the mechanical rigidity of your body and soul.

"This is the great tragedy. And Christ happened to know it."

Wilhelm Reich, The Murder of Christ, 1953.

Wilhelm Reich under arrest for alleged Food and Drug Administration violations shortly before his death in prison

Bliss is the primary emotional characteristic of existence. If we are not worried or depressed or frightened or in pain then we have no choice but to feel joy because that is what is left when those other feelings are absent. "And he said: "I tell you the truth, unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven." Matthew 18:3, NIV. When we were young children we knew "heaven". When nothing was currently troubling us we knew bliss. In adult life we tend to fall under the illusion that happiness is something which must be earned or paid for. We try to buy happiness in the form of expensive possessions. We try to win happiness by engaging in competitive behaviour. We try to earn happiness by being a good person. We have forgotten that, unless we are struggling for our existence or being seriously mistreated, happiness is freely available to us whenever we feel ready to give up trying to prove anything about ourselves and simply be.

Repentance, in the traditional sense, would just be another form of armouring – another bar on Hell's cage – because to feel regret and strive to exercise self-discipline is to tie ourselves up more tightly in our self. This is why Jesus emphasised that "sins" (i.e. forms of selfishness) are forgiven by "God" (i.e. the creative principle of the universe). Because the way to access the healing joy of raw existence and thus move beyond selfishness is to live in the present as a child does.

So this famous passage could be restated : "Change your consciousness for happiness is all around you."